For the first time in company history, KHS has been awarded a platinum medal by EcoVadis, certifying the system provider’s excellent achievements with respect to sustainability and the progress it has made in this field.
Depending on the size of the company and the branch of industry, the rating includes up to 21 different sustainability criteria, which are based on various ESG topics and split into the categories of environment, labour and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement.
Compared to the previous year – winning gold with a score of 75, KHS had improved further and now received 86 out of 100 possible points.
The achievement now makes the turnkey supplier among the top one per cent of the companies rated by EcoVadis – with this figure currently at over 150,000.
“We’ve met the strict requirements of EcoVadis and had our sustainability achievements rated since 2012,” said Kai Acker, CEO of KHS.
“Our platinum medal sends both an important message to our customers and acts as confirmation for the KHS Group that we’re taking our responsibility to sustainable business seriously, and that we are on the right track here.”
One reason for the recent accolade was the company’s extended guideline and certification management program, which considerably helped to better KHS’s achievements in the ethics and labour and human rights categories in particular.
Moreover, as in previous years, KHS was able to further improve in the sustainable procurement section and more or less keep its performance to date in the environment sector at the previous year’s level.
Regarding climate protection, the Executive Management Board is consistently guiding the engineering company towards net zero by 2050 at the latest.
For several years now, EcoVadis has also enabled a company’s carbon management system to be independently assessed using what’s known as the carbon scorecard. This is not yet part of the overall rating, however, KHS has already actively incorporated it into its own carbon management setup.
“In this way, we can gauge the effectiveness of our climate strategy and the operational measures derived from it, plus of those throughout our value chain,” Acker added.
KHS also scored points for its voluntary sustainability reporting. In the current report, for the first time, the company has also accounted for a number of requirements specified by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
This applies uniform rules to the disclosure of sustainability data to ensure transparency and comparability between different companies and their sustainability achievements.
The aim in the next few years is to gradually bring the voluntary KHS report into line with requirements for obligatory reports governed by the CSRD.
“In doing so, we’ll be heading for a successful rating in the future, too, and can further strengthen our position,“ concluded Nicole Pohl, senior ESG manager at KHS.
